Here is what I am trying to achieve: at development time, you often need to change a page multiple times to get a satisfied result; but redeploying the whole EAR every time a small change is made is tedious and time consuming. So, I like to find a way to allow me make changes to the JSF files and then immediately switch to the browser and see that change taking effects. I am using JBoss AS 4.0.5.GA, JBoss Eclipse IDE 2.0.0 Beta 2 and Seam 1.2.1 GA.

I feel there is a general lack of docs/tutorials on setting things up. Anyway, here is what I found to be the most relevant: http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&t=103503.

And here is what I have:

1. My development files are organized in the same way as the booking example: src, view, resources, etc.

2. Create a deploy folder under the project and all the .ear, .war, .jar folders accordingly under it, so I end up with the following structure:

[Code]
project
-deploy
-was.ear
-META-INF
-was.jar
-was.war
[/Code]

3. In Project Properties --> Java Build Path --> Source tab, check the box for "Allow output folders for source folders". And then add each src/resource folder to its appropriate output folder.

The problem I have here is that JBoss Eclipse doesn't allow you to nest one output folder inside another. So, if I set my "view" folder to output to "was.war", I cannot output "resource/WEB-INF" to "war.war/WEB-INF", because the latter output dir is inside the former. So I ended up moving files around to match the ear/war structure, it's really messy.


4. In jboss-4.0.5.GA\server\default\conf\jboss-service.xml, add "/C:/workspace/seam-was/was/deploy/" to the URLs to be scanned. I found that I need to add a slash / in front of C:, otherwise, it's taken as a relative path to the jboss home dir.

5. Start JBoss server and the EAR folder deployed correctly.

6. Now, I made some change to one xhtml file; but nothing happened, refreshing the browser still gives me the old page. I tried to touch the web.xml (edit it, add a space and remove it), still nothing happened.

So, my questions are:

1. Why the changes are not redeployed?
2. Is there a better way to do exploded type deployment in JBoss Eclipse?